"Hay Days" n "Real Work"

So I'm sitting in my room, it's dark, and the only light is from my laptop screen. Who am I? Just another person in the billions that live on this floating chunk of dirt we call earth. Who am I really? That's a question I've been searching on, and am still finding answers.

I tend to be a pretty honest and upfront person...I dislike games and drama, but life seems to be chock full of just that.

So the jist of me: 25 year old Christian college student who is artist, musically talented, and passionate about anything and everything to do with dance. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest and then moved south to the "big" city.

Today I was chatting with a friend and we somehow got on the topic of "hay days", in a very literal sense of those two words, and it sent me into a long and wonderful reminise of those days...and this is just what I want to write about tonight.

On my parent's farm we had some hay ground on the main homestead, but we also had a seperate piece of ground, about 40 acres just for growing hay, a bit over an hour's drive away. It was a fine piece of land and sometimes yeilded up to 1,800 square bales a cutting. That's a lot of hay, by the way! It usually took around a week to get it all cut, raked, baled, picked up off the field, moved from hay ground to homestead, and then on up into the loft. Every single time was always an adventure, whether it was a race against a storm and rain, or keeping all the equipment running to being shorthanded on the baling crew. And somehow, that pasture was always best and ready for baling on some of the very hottest of days in summer. We would hire a crew of about 4-6 men and then there were about 6 of us. Most of the time, I landed a job stacking the bales on the hay rack as the men threw them up from off the pasture. Would stack those racks around 7 high sometimes.Or else, I worked in the loft, darting, crawling, scrabbling around those hay stacks as the men would throw the bales in and stack them, and right after I'd be there, salting them. Yup, just literally putting a handful or two of salt on the top of the bales to help keep them from molding. It was sweaty hot hard work, but the smell of fresh sweet hay was about intoxicating, the friendships we made between crew members and the wonderful feeling of having accomplished a lot at the end of the day as well as sleeping like a baby are certainly memories for a lifetime.

I will write more about haying on another post, but hay season was certainly one of the best times on the farm, not the very best, but one of the best. I say that because there are somethings in life that cannot be compared to others and are just as equally good in their own ways. But I'll finish of this post with a pic of one of our hay fields and a poem I wrote several years ago about "hay days".

It's Real Work

Here they come, flyin' thro' the door

And on they're rolled across the floor.

Hefted up and then stacked high

Towards the roof, towards blue sky.

May a breeze blow! Drippin' wet,

Muscles ripple, drenched in sweat.

It's real work at its very best.

The feelin's so good - endurance in test.

Excitement's always just round the bend

Not a problem, but an adventure to send

Us all the more fun-just do it with love 

Just watch for blessings from God above.

Walkin' on air, just covered in dust

The end's just ahead, so keep movin' - you must!

The moon'll peek if the sunlight fails;

Almost there - keep throwin' em bales!